He did appear to have a point. The dashboard of a car is not like the inside of an aircraft hangar, and even then, in the days of the Rover 216, it was pretty much jammed full with tubes and looms and relays. So how, I wondered as I crawled along at 50mph for yet more miles, has Audi managed?
Quite apart from the head-up display and the climate control and the satnav and the passenger airbag, there were buttons to stop the engine shutting down at the lights, buttons to alter the interior lighting, buttons to turn off the traction control, buttons in fact to turn off a million things that hadn’t even been invented when Johnny Rover Man was pulling his hair out.
And because I was still doing 50mph, to ‘protect the workforce’ that wasn’t bloody there, I started to wonder about more things. The engine, for example, is a dirty great V8 that’s fitted with two turbochargers. How does that go under the bonnet?
And then there’s the four-wheel-drive system and the antilock braking system and the bouncy castle that inflates when you have a bump, and the parking sensors and the cameras and the system that steers the car by itself and the forward-facing radar. Why, I wondered, isn’t this car bigger than the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower?
And then the man in the control box decided that, actually, 50mph was way too fast for this day and age, so he changed the dot-matrix signs to say we could do only 40mph. And then I began to wonder why on earth anyone in their right mind would buy a car such as the 155mph Audi.
That didn’t take long to answer. Because it can do 155mph, it is barely awake at 40, which means it is supremely quiet and, if you put the suspension in Comfort mode, dreamily smooth. Honestly, I’ve been in noisier and less comfortable beds.
You may imagine that a car this squidgy is incapable of being exciting. And you’d be right. Even if you put everything in Sport mode – that’s something else you can do – and turn off the traction control, it is stubbornly understeery. It’s almost as though it’s saying: ‘What on earth are you playing at?’
A fair point. Driving a car such as this as though your hair’s on fire is like playing rugby in a £400 pair of loafers. And that brings me on to the question of price. I don’t know what it costs and I can’t be bothered to look it up. This is not a car anyone will buy. It’ll be leased. And the monthly bill will depend on who you are, how many A4s you’re buying for your sales staff and whether the dealer is struggling to meet his yearly quotas. All I do know is that it’ll be a lot less than you imagine.
Of course, exactly the same applies if you are thinking of buying a Mercedes S-class, or the Jaguar XJ, or a BMW 7-series, which are pretty much identical to the big Audi. They’re all quiet and comfortable and loaded up with stuff you’ll never use and power reserves you’ll never need. The S8 Plus I had developed 84bhp more than the A8 on which it’s based. Which meant … absolutely nothing at all.
What does matter is that I liked it. I’ve always said the 7-series is the best of the big barges. But I don’t think it is any more. I think the A8 is a nicer place to be. When you’re doing 40. Which you will be.
The only problem is: you currently use a Merc, don’t you? And you’re used to it. And you’re frightened to change. Don’t be.
9 October 2016
Take it away – I’m just not ready to grow up
Citroën Grand C4 Picasso
I had a bit of a discussion the other day about when men grow up. A friend explained that when he used to work in a clothes shop he would fill quieter parts of the day by carefully unwrapping the underwear. He’d then use a chocolate bar to create authentic-looking skid marks before wrapping it up again and putting it back on the shelves. ‘The beauty was,’ he said, ‘that no one would ever bring it back to complain.’
I won’t tell you his name, obviously, save to say that it begins with an A and ends in A. Gill. What I will tell you is that today he’s in his sixtiesfn1 but, given the chance, he said with a big smile, he’d do the exact same thing again.
I fear I’m just as bad. When I’m told by a passport person to stand behind the line, I simply cannot bring myself to do it. I always, always, always position myself so that at least some of one foot is in the forbidden zone. It’s pathetic but I can’t help myself.
It’s why I loathe average-speed cameras. With a normal Gatso you can roar up to the box, brake as late as possible and then roar off again when the damn thing is out of range. That’s sticking one to The Man. But when you are being monitored constantly, there is absolutely nothing you can do. You are forced to just sit there being obedient, and that causes me actual physical pain.
Neatly stacked tins in a supermarket make me ill as well. I become dizzy and faint when I walk past them because the urge to knock them over is so unbelievably strong. It’s one of the few things left on my bucket list.
However, I’ll need to hurry up about it because I can feel myself getting old. I can sense the rebel in my soul quietening down. It’s not just because I now enjoy a ‘nice sit-down’ more than almost anything. It’s worse. It’s because I can’t be bothered half the time to make a nuisance of myself.
This brings me on to the business of renting a car. It’s a chore. It’s up there with trying on trousers or rubbing suncream into James May’s back. You stand for hours in a queue full of terrible people, and when you finally get to the front of it, you are made to stand there while the woman behind the counter writes War and Peace on her computer.
Why do they always do this? I have the money and they have the car, so what’s the complication? Why the need to tap away on a keyboard for three hours? They don’t do that in a sweetshop or at a petrol station. But they do at the airport rental desk. And the only upside is that when the interminable wait is over, you are given the keys to the fastest car in the world.
I have always driven hire cars as though my hair were on fire. It’s just so liberating when you arrive at a road where a sign says ‘Unsuitable for motors’ and you think, as you floor it, ‘Yes, but it’s suitable for this one, because … yee-haw … it isn’t mine.’
This year I rented a house in Mallorca that sat at the top of what was easily the narrowest and longest and most challenging drive in all of the world. In the past it wouldn’t have bothered me one bit. I’d have simply ricocheted up it in the rental car, bouncing off the trees and the walls as though I was a large-scale demonstration of Brownian motion.
However, this year I found myself taking care. And amazingly at the end of the ten-day break the hire car was handed back without a scratch. It was a first, and it made me think: ‘Oh shit. At the age of fifty-six I’ve become an adult.’
The panic, though, is over, because last week Citroën sent round the same car as I’d been using in Mallorca. It’s a Grand C4 Picasso and it had the most extraordinary effect on me. I drove about the place, agreeing with all the callers on the Jeremy Vine show and missing Nigel Farage.
I scoffed at girls in ripped jeans, tutted at men with earrings and engaged the handbrake when stationary. This is a car that can accelerate from 0 to 62mph in 10.1 seconds and thunder onwards to a speed of nearly 130mph. But I never did either of those things.
What I did instead was admire some of the features, such as the comfy headrests and the passenger seat that comes with an electrically operated footrest for when the floor is just too uncomfortable. Then there are the sun visors that fold up and away to reveal a windscreen big enough for a National Express coach, and, further back, an all-glass roof.
Further back still, there’s a third row of seats, and everywhere you look there are cubbyholes and storage bins. This is one of those cars that are hard to resist in the showroom. It really is jam-packed with stuff you’ll want as soon as you see it.
Driving it is a different story, because there is some quirkiness. The gear lever, for instance, is a flimsy little stalk on the steering column. And just about everything else is operated by a screen in the middle of the car. That’s fiddly and annoying.
Well, it would be, but you’ll be too busy stick
ing to the speed limit to be overly worried about how you turn off the engine stop-start function. Not that you’d want to turn it off, because it saves fuel and that saves money. And saving money is the single most important thing in life. It’s why Grand C4 Picasso owners do all their shopping in the sales and only go to restaurants with all-you-can-eat buffets for £4.99.
It’s why they have Citroëns in the first place. Because they are cheap, long before you get to the endless everything-must-go special offers.
This is not a criticism of Citroën’s customers. Each to his or her own. And it certainly isn’t a criticism of the car, because if you want a seven-seater, it makes a deal of sense. You just have to remember that behind the clever design touches there’s a car that’s not inspiring to drive and will break down more than, say, a Toyota. And that sounds like the incoming-torpedo alert on a submarine if you leave the lights on or open the door when the engine’s running.
On the upside, though, you’ll never crash it. Because you’ll never be going fast enough. Because a Grand C4 Picasso brings out the adult that lives in us all.
That said, just before the delivery driver came to take it away, I was tempted to create some chocolate skid marks on the seat. And say it was like that when it was delivered.
23 October 2016
The moor the merrier in our hot hatch rally
VW Golf GTI Clubsport
My television colleagues and I had to visit Whitby recently, which meant there was a debate in the office about how we’d get to North Yorkshire. If we chose something comfortable and quiet, to deal with the massively over-policed M1, it’d be no fun at all once we got past Malton and said: ‘Have some of that.’
Whereas if we chose something that would be fun on that truly glorious road over Fylingdales Moor, it’d be a chore in the stop-start hell that is the M1.
In the end we decided to cheat and use a train from London to York, which is more expensive than going on a golden elephant but takes about three minutes these days. And then we’d use a car for the final leg.
But what car? The temptation, obviously, was to select something idiotic – a Lamborghini Aventador, perhaps, or the new and really rather beautiful Ferrari GTC4Lusso. But the truth is, show-off cars such as those are designed to work, mostly, in cities.
So quite quickly all three of us decided that hot hatchbacks would be perfect for the job. And this caused another debate. There’s no doubt at all that the best of the bunch is the little Ford Fiesta ST. But I’d driven that, and anyway it was shotgunned immediately by Mr Hammond.
And before I could draw breath to say, ‘Well, I’ll have a Ford Focus RS, then’, James May put down his pipe, adjusted his slippers and shotgunned that. So I had a good long think and remembered that Volkswagen had recently smashed the front-wheel-drive lap record at the Nürburgring with a car called the Golf GTI Clubsport S.
In essence it’s a GTI, but, thanks to a lot of electrical jiggery-pokery under the bonnet, it produces a colossal 306bhp. And there’s more. The ride has been made priapic. The body shell has been stiffened. The back seats and the parcel shelf and various bits of carpet have been removed. And as a result it’s hard and tight and light and, as we saw when it broke that lap record, very, very fast.
This is exactly the sort of car that would be terrible to live with day to day but perfect for an afternoon assault on the North York Moors. I was very happy with my choice until I received word that the Clubsport S is a limited-edition special, and that none was available.
Instead I ended up with a car built to celebrate the GTI’s fortieth birthday. Called the Clubsport Edition 40, it looks like a Clubsport S but it has carpets and back seats and all the luxuries you’d expect. You can even have it with four doors, which is a very un-Clubsporty thing.
All of which means it’s a GTI with some spoilers and a small amount of electrical jiggery-pokery under the bonnet. And that in turn means it’s nothing more than a slightly pricier version of a car I already own.
It did have a nicer steering wheel – I’ll admit that. And lovely seats. But it had a manual gearbox, which was a nuisance in York, where the traffic lights are red for about six years and then flash green in the same way as the sun does when it sinks into the sea. It took longer to get out of the city than it had taken to get there from London.
By the time I finally found the A64 to Pickering and the glory of the moors, I was far behind Hammond in his little Fiesta, but it’s always possible to catch May. Even if you’re on a mule with a hurty leg.
So off I set, and straight away I could tell the Clubsport Edition 40 is more than VW’s present to itself. The figures suggest it has only 35 more brake horsepower than the standard GTI, but if your right foot comes into contact with the firewall, there’s an overboost facility that gives you 286bhp. This makes the front wheels spin, which makes the traction control go into busybody mode. Which means that if you want this sort of power for this sort of money, you’re better off with the all-wheel-drive Golf R.
However. And it’s a big however. In my standard GTI – chosen because I can’t be bothered to explain to people at parties what an R is – there’s a definite hole in the power delivery. When you just want to go slightly faster, you put your foot down a bit and … nothing happens.
It’s almost certainly some kind of ludicrous emission programme in the engine control unit, but it feels like turbo lag and it’s annoying. However, in the Clubsport Edition 40 it doesn’t happen. The movement of your foot is translated instantly into a change of pace. It makes the whole car feel more alert and alive.
I’d love to tell you that the chassis is crisper too, because it probably is. But the truth is that this car feels exactly the same as the standard GTI. Which means it is extremely clever at riding the bumps and then gripping as if it’s on spikes in the corners.
VW even says that the bigger rear spoiler and the splitter at the front create actual downforce once you’re going above 75mph. So in order to not crash, you just need to speed up.
Hammond will tell you – and he’s right – the Fiesta ST is more fun, and May will tell you that the Focus RS is better in extremis. But as a blend of all you need, the VW is in a class of its own.
It’s the same story with the interior. Everything has a top-quality feel that you just don’t get in the two Fords, plus there’s a lot of standard equipment provided as standard.
Of course it’s not as good as the Golf R. That’s a remarkable car. A brilliant car. But if you want a GTI because, well, you want a GTI, this Clubsport Edition 40 makes a deal of sense. It’s my own car, with a couple of neat styling touches and the performance hole caused by bureaucrats in Brussels filled in.
Richard disagreed with this. And so did James when he finally arrived at the hotel. And we argued about that into the night. It’s good to be back.
6 November 2016
Engineers – give it everything you’ve got
Audi SQ7
James May has decided he doesn’t like Audis. I recently had to transport him in the back of the new SQ7 and he chuntered away constantly like a speedboat on tickover. Obviously, I can’t be bothered to listen to his specific gripes but the thrust of his argument seems to be there’s too much design and not enough engineering.
As usual, he’s wrong. Because the SQ7 – the hot version of Audi’s biggest SUV – is actually a lumpen-looking thing that hasn’t been designed enough. But oh my God. There’s more engineering in this 2.25-ton, 16.5-foot road rocket than you find in that giant arch they’re building over reactor four at Chernobyl. This car? It’s like the spirits of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Steve Jobs have come together to create a mind-boggling orgy of brute force and chips.
We shall start with the engine. You’d expect, in a car that goes from 0 to 62mph in less than five seconds, and onwards to a top speed of about a million, that it’d be a monstrous V12 with petrol coursing through its injectors. But to make it even more annoying for the world’s ecomentalists, it’s a 4-
litre V8 forced-induction diesel.
I say ‘forced induction’ rather than ‘turbocharged’ because Audi has invented a whole new way of ramming air into the cylinders. You get two turbochargers, as you’d expect these days, but downstream of the intercooler and close to the engine itself there’s something the no-nonsense Germans have called an ‘electrically powered compressor’ (EPC). What it is is a compressor that’s powered by electricity rather than exhaust gases. And it can go from rest to 70,000rpm in less than 250 milliseconds. Which is, as near as dammit, instantaneous.
In a normal turbocharged car there is always a gap between you putting your foot down and the engine delivering its full potential. This is because the turbochargers take time to spool up. In the SQ7 that gap is filled by the EPC.
What I love about this is that it’s a massively complicated solution to a problem that today exists only in books about algebra. Turbo lag – as the gap is called – was pronounced and annoying when turbocharged road cars came along in the Seventies. But today it’s noticeable only if you concentrate very, very hard. Which means Audi has spent a fortune exorcising something that exists only in theory. It is to be commended for this in the same way as a top-flight chef is to be commended for going the extra mile with his truffle sauce. Almost none of his customers will notice, but …
And that brings me on to the engine itself, specifically the cam shafts, which are profiled so that they vary the amount of valve movement. This is advanced mechanics, but what it means, Audi says, is that you get torque when you want it and economy the rest of the time. Again, you won’t notice, but …
Really? Page 24
